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‘I Can Speak From Personal Experience’: Just Two Weeks Ago Pence Called for Special Counsel for Biden Classified Docs
It was just two weeks ago that former Vice President Mike Pence was demanding a special counsel be appointed to look into President Joe Biden‘s handling of classified documents, after a small number had been found in an office at the Penn-Biden Center. Now some are calling for DOJ to appoint a special counsel to investigate the former Trump vice president’s handling of classified documents, after CNN reported Tuesday on the dozen or so classified documents that were found in Pence’s Indiana home and turned over to the FBI and the National Archives.
Pence, who is expected to launch a 2024 presidential run, had taken to the right-wing media talk circuit, demanding “equal treatment” by the U.S. Dept. of Justice for President Biden, after Attorney General Merrick Garland had appointed a special counsel in November to investigate ex-president Donald Trump’s possibly criminal handling of classified documents.
Attorney General Garland ultimately, and exceptionally quickly, did appoint a special counsel to look into Biden’s classified documents handling, leading Pence to say he had been “deeply troubled” before that happened.
READ MORE: Watch: Top Trump Ally Lindsey Graham Defends Biden In Classified Docs Probe
“Look, there’s equal treatment in the law [that] is at the very center of the expectation of the American people,” Pence, calling for a special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, had told right wing personality Hugh Hewitt exactly two weeks ago, on January 10.
He also blasted the Biden administration for the DOJ executing a search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, last summer. And he criticized the media for what he wrongly called “turning a deaf ear” to the Biden classified documents issue, which is false.
“Well, as I said last summer when the home of a former president of the United States, you know, was raided by FBI agents, I was deeply troubled by that action at the time. And this double standard is just as troubling. You know, there’s that old saying that if they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all,” Pence told Hewitt, despite there being no double standard.
“And Hugh, this is, whether it be the administration or whether it be the media papering over this, look, it was a massive overreach by the FBI, a massive overreaction this summer to execute a search warrant at the personal residence of a former president of the United States, and I said so. But having now created that standard and now abandoned that standard when the current president of the United States is found to have had classified documents in his possession after leaving office, I think it just, I have no words right now. It’s just incredibly frustrating to me.”
He also continued to berate the Biden administration and the media.
“You know, the reality is that now they’ve, you know, what they have unleashed now has the threat of coming back on them,” he said of the Biden administration, for allowing DOJ to execute the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. “But the willingness of the national media to just turn away and turn a deaf ear to the Biden, to the disclosures that when Vice President Biden left office, he left with classified documents as well, it just shows you, it’s like I said before. If they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.”
Pence has repeatedly denied having any classified documents, which we now know was false.
Question: Did you take any classified documents with you from the white house?
Pence: I did not. pic.twitter.com/hbErVijbXt— Acyn (@Acyn) January 24, 2023
Pence wasn’t done attacking President Biden.
Two days later, on Jan. 12, he went on Fox News Business, using nearly the same language, telling former Trump White House official Larry Kudlow that “equal treatment under the law is at the very center of American jurisprudence,” and applauding the decision to appoint a special counsel to look into the Biden classified documents.
“And earlier this week, I called for that. I welcome the decision by Attorney General Garland, who will appoint a special counsel. If we have a special counsel reviewing classified materials that were found at Mar-a-Lago, we need to have a special counsel in this case, and that’s progress.”
Pence said he could “speak from personal experience” about the importance of properly handling classified documents.
“The handling of classified materials, and the nation’s secrets is very serious matter. And as a former Vice President of the United States I can speak from personal experience but the attention that ought to be paid to those materials when you’re in office, and after you leave office. And clearly, that did not take place in this case.”
So based on this clip, does Pence welcome a special counsel being appointed in his case? pic.twitter.com/MA2ncza9Ug
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 24, 2023
The difference between the Biden classified documents issue and the Trump classified documents case is huge.
President Biden reported all classified documents found to DOJ and the National Archives and had then sent to NARA immediately.
Trump reportedly had classified documents and thousands of other items belonging to the federal government shipped from the White House to his residence and resort in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, and according to several former officials, helped pack some of the boxes himself.
He then spent over a year lying about what he had at Mar-a-Lago, and repeatedly refused to return the stolen items.
Some experts say a special counsel should be appointed for Pence’s handling of classified documents.
Law professor, MSNBC legal contributor, and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance says, “No reason to treat Pence differently” from President Biden.
This is the reg governing when the AG should appoint a special counsel. Note that it hinges on whether a criminal investigation is warranted, an issue DOJ seemed blow past with Biden, perhaps out of concern over public perception. No reason to treat Pence differently pic.twitter.com/76rBci1EXn
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) January 24, 2023
National security attorney Mark S. Zaid says Pence should allow the FBI “to voluntarily search his offices & residence for additional classified docs.”
Watch the videos above or at this link.
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Democrats made a “fundamental miscalculation” in the redistricting wars and now have “little chance” in the November midterms, argues Eric Garcia at The Independent.
Calling the Virginia Supreme Court’s nullification of a voter-led ballot initiative that allowed the creation of four Democratic congressional districts a “massive body blow,” Garcia also points to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision “virtually nullifying the Voting Rights Act” by requiring Louisiana to redraw its congressional map. There is also the Tennessee legislature turning majority-Black Memphis into another GOP seat — erasing the only Democratic seat in that state.
“And this does not count the redrawing of congressional districts in Missouri and North Carolina before the Supreme Court decision, or Alabama, which is under a court order to not redraw its map until 2030,” Garcia says. He notes that California has been the only state to respond, doing so by adding five Democratic seats to the state.
Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, a political news outlet, “put it bleakly for Democrats.”
Donnini says that now, instead of having to flip just three seats to take the majority in the House, Democrats will have to flip an additional nine seats — a total of twelve in all.
Democrats tried to “lead by example,” but, Garcia says, they turned their states into “laboratories for democracy” by creating “unilateral” disarmament “on behalf of the Democrats” — an act, he labels, a “fundamental failure.”
But he offers Democrats a little hope.
Texas’s redistricting plan relied on Hispanic voters, “after flirting with Trump,” to stay aligned with the GOP. That might have changed. The situation is the same in South Florida, “where the state’s normally conservative Cuban Americans have been caught in the Trump immigration dragnet.”
Pointing to inflation, the economy overall, and Trump’s Iran war, Garcia says Republicans holding on to the House might be “even more difficult.”
Democrats, however, made a “fundamental miscalculation,” Garcia concludes. “By creating guardrails and rules, Republicans did not see a reason to compromise and meet them halfway. It made them targets for weakening. Now, Democrats have put themselves in a bind. They only have themselves to blame.”
Image: Public Domain by Architect of the Capitol via Flickr
President Donald Trump is “bored” with his Iran war, but Iran is not — and isn’t ready for the war to be over, argues Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic.
The president, now in a “bind,” is tired of the war he started, and has declared victory several times, while Iran “does not want the war to come to a close.”
Trump’s GOP “is warily watching rising gas prices and falling poll numbers,” while the president “doesn’t want to be bogged down in a Middle East conflict like some of his predecessors were. He doesn’t want it to upend his high-stakes summit next week in China. He is ready to move on.”
“The president, five aides and outside advisers told me, is convinced that he can sell any sort of agreement as a win. But at least for now, the man who wrote The Art of the Deal can’t even get Iran to the negotiating table.”
Iran hasn’t even responded to Trump’s one-page memo “that is far more of an extension of the cease-fire than a treaty to end the conflict.”
Trump, Lemire says, did not expect the war to go like this. After his successful excursion into Venezuela, he “set his eyes on Iran, telling confidants that it would ‘be another Venezuela,’ a pair of outside advisers told me.”
It has not been that.
Trump expected his Iran war to last days, or maybe a week or two. It has now been months.
And while administration officials believe the blockade will be successful, experts say Iran can withstand it for months, time the president, with the midterms coming, does not have.
“It then becomes a matter of pain: Which side can withstand the most economic hardship?” Lemire asks.
Trump, impatient, has debated declaring victory and moving on.
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio went so far as to say earlier this week that the war was over,” Lemire notes. “But doing so now would leave the conflict’s goals, as outlined at various times by the president and his aides, unfulfilled.”
The president, says Lemire, “wants the war to end. He wants a deal. But deals take two parties, and there’s no evidence that Iran is interested in bailing Trump out of a dilemma of his own making.”
Image via Reuters
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) says that aliens from outer space are actually “fallen angels and Nephilim” from the Old Testament of the Bible, according to Right Wing Watch. On Friday, President Donald Trump released declassified government UFO files.
“God is the creator of the universe,” Congresswoman Boebert says in recorded video published Friday by Right Wing Watch. “He’s never not going to create.”
The Colorado Republican lawmaker said that it’s “always been something in my mind to say, ‘Well, how can we be the only ones?’ Like, God’s not going to stop creating just with us.”
“But the more I look into this,” she continued, speaking from inside a car, “the more I see the Old Testament and what was told to us there, of fallen angels, and Nephilim.”
She defended her take by saying, “this is in the Bible,” and there’s “nothing that says that fallen angels, that Nephilim just disappeared. And so I believe that this could be an aspect of it.”
Boebert went on to say that “things that we have seen…could resemble portals,” although in the video she does not explain further.
“And, you know, I mean, this is, we serve an infinite God, a God of the universe. And to say that this is the only realm, is ignorant.”
She denied that aliens are a “Marvin the Martian kind of thing.”
“But I do believe that this is more spiritual, and if you really want to go there, demonic.”
Image via Shutterstock
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